Review: The Fireman by Joe Hill

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Pub. Date: January 3rd, 2017
Pages: 768

Genres: Science Fiction / Horror / Thriller / Dystopian

Synopsis

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman.


The fireman is coming. Stay cool.


No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child.

Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged.

In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

What Did I Think About the Story?

At this point, if you follow my blog at all, you are probably aware that I've become somewhat of a fangirl of Joe Hill. Over the last year or so I've been trying to read my way through his novels, short stories, and his comic book series (seriously, I'll say it again, listen to the audiobook of Locke and Key for the best audiobook I've still ever listened to), and if I haven't yet experienced them all I've at least purchased copies to read when I can. With all this being said I've now got pretty high hopes for any of his work I pick up, which can sometimes be a good thing and can sometimes lead to disappointment. Well, I'm happy to say that, with The Fireman, he exceeded everything I was expecting and gave me my favorite of his novels yet.

The synopsis above gives a pretty good overview of what the novel is about. What it doesn't describe is how well thought out and drawn this apocalyptic world Harper finds herself in is, with people reacting and acting just as you'd probably imagine. The world becomes a burning nightmare, full of scared people made vicious and often heartless by this fear, or simply by the fact that they are now able to let their inner monsters out without fear of reprisals. Balanced against this are a few people who stay true to at least part of their goodness, trying to survive without succumbing to the evilness around them. It's all just a completely immersive experience that is simply terrifying for how real it feels and how easily you could see something like this happening (at least the people's reactions).

All of the characters, whether you like them or not, are phenomenal as well. Harper, in particular, was a favorite. She's somehow gritty and mild-mannered at the same time...think of a Disney character as written by a horror novelist. She loves to sing and keep positive and find the light at the end of each tunnel, even when it's obscured by fire and smoke. She is determined to find a safe place for her baby at any cost, all while also retaining her humanity as much as possible. Even the spore itself becomes its own character, controlling it's hosts and making many of them display a mob-like behavior as a sort of mechanism for survival. We get to learn so much about this spore, along with all of the characters, that I couldn't help but be completely invested in how this madness could possibly end (which I found pretty realistic and somewhat sad).

The Fireman is a hefty tome of realistic terror and one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. At it's core it is an epic journey of one woman's search for a safe place for her child and the remarkable people (good and bad) that she encounters along the way. It's full of hope, humor, horror, and sadness. It's a look at humanity, as well as the loss of it, and the idea that, no matter how hard life gets, it can continue with a lot of determination and a little bit of singing. Highly recommend!

What Did I Think About the Cover?

It's absolutely perfect for this story. Clearly the fire shown is prevalent and important to the overall story (I especially love the charred outlines) and I love how it is incorporated throughout the cover, including in the title and the author's name.


My Rating: 5.0/5.0

I purchased a copy of The Fireman for my own library. All opinions are mine alone. To find more information about the book, including other reviews and links to where you can purchase a copy, see Goodreads HERE.

 

 

Reviews of Other Books by Joe Hill

 

 

Heart-Shaped Box

Strange Weather

Locke & Key

Horns

 



Guest Post by Dusk Peterson, Author of Sweet Blood

I was fifteen when I asked my father to teach me how to research history for a book.

This isn't as odd as it sounds. My earliest datable memory, from age three, is of my father, –a literary historian and later a printing historian, –describing to me the history of nearby buildings while we waited in a hospital room after my mother had surgery. By my teens, my father was talking to me nearly every evening about his research. Meanwhile, my younger brother had decided he wanted to be an archaeologist; our helpful parents took us to archaeological sites. When I became enthralled in Arthurian Britain, my mother took my brother and me to Arthurian sites when we visited England. Soon we were all watching historical documentaries and historical dramas together.

So one day in the summer of 1978, my father took me to the Library of Congress (which he had first introduced me to five years earlier, when I was at the tender age of ten). He showed me how to use the library's new electronic catalogue, and he introduced me to the National Union Catalog: 130 feet of books collecting catalogue entries from libraries around the United States.

Afterwards, he quizzed me about my chosen research topic: the Agrarian Revolution, in which the British working class clashed – sometimes violently – with the ruling class over new farming practices that favored the elite. My father suggested that I might benefit from looking up newspaper accounts written at the time of the events I wished to research. Soon I was absorbed in 1819 newspaper accounts of the Peterloo Massacre.

All this whetted my appetite for real research. In high school, I decided I was tired of reading blandly written textbooks about historical events; I wanted to work with actual historical materials. So I ended up at St. John's College in Annapolis, which had a Great Books program. We read Homer and Dante and Shakespeare and Mark Twain. We learned political theory by perusing the writings of Machiavelli, Marx, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions. We learned math by studying Euclid, Isaac Newton, and Einstein. We learned science by recreating the experiments of Galileo, Lavoisier, and Faraday. We debated with fury and delight over whether Aristotle or Kant was correct about ethics. My best friend and I dressed up on Halloween as Ancient Greek parts of speech.

After college, I took a few graduate courses in history and worked in publishing and journalism, freelancing as a history writer so that I could write about everything from Renaissance calendars to American colonial churches. I also worked as a historical researcher for other writers. I spent a lot of time in the Library of Congress.

My father had given me my first computer in 1987; now the digital era was upon us, and my father introduced me to Internet research in 1994. I began surfing through some of the earliest history sites on the web. I published a news e-zine and did research for that. By 2000, I was spending up to eighteen hours a day researching online.

Then my health broke.

That health crisis, which came close to ending my career as a writer, proved to be a blessing. I found myself asking, "Am I really doing what I want to do with my life?" The answer was clearly no. I'd known what I wanted most to do since age nine: be a novelist.

So I dusted off a fantasy series I'd started in 1995, based on a story I'd written at age sixteen, which in turn was inspired by Arthurian tales of fifth-century Britain and by what I learned in my high school Latin class. I created an empire, sent it to conquer a neighboring country, and the next thing that my young protagonist knew, he was a slave in the empire and could only be rescued from destruction if he befriended the very young man he'd previously vowed to kill.

The Three Lands series was history-light: inspired by history, but without substantial research backing it. By 2002, however, I'd discovered the online fiction community. For that community, I started what turned into an eight-series cycle of alternate history stories, set in a version of America that had been settled in ancient times and therefore retained certain classical and medieval customs. The Eternal Dungeon, Dungeon Guards, Life Prison, Michael's House, Commando, Waterman, Young Toughs, Dark Light . . . Each time I started a new series, I ended up plunging into a new research topic: nineteenth-century prisons, turn-of-the-century warfare, early twentieth century lives in theater and poverty and prostitution, 1910s boarding schools, 1910s battles between fishermen, 1960s visions of the future . . . All of this set in a variety of locations in an alternative version of the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

I think that, if I'd been an academic historian who spent decades researching a single topic, I would have gone mad with boredom. What I wanted to do as a novelist of historical speculative fiction was learn about a lot of different topics of American history. My background was as a journalist and as a history writer for general audiences; I was used to immersing myself in topics that I'd previously known nothing about.

As a novelist, I researched in the Library of Congress, in university libraries, in regional studies libraries, in museums and historical sites, and – more and more – in the substantial offerings of the Internet. Worried that I was becoming overly dependent on electronic research, I checked with my father, who was now retired from his job as a university professor and was devoting his time to his research projects. He told me that eighty percent of his own research was now done online. Digital history had become that important.

I issued my stories initially on e-mail lists devoted to online fiction. Readers asked for more stories. By 2007, I was publishing my stories as e-books. My Turn-of-the-Century Toughs cycle was an odd blend of alternate history, adventure, suspense, romance (gay, heterosexual, and asexual), and even a few science fiction stories and young adult tales. My Three Lands series also didn't seem to fit neatly into normal genre categories. But I continued to be prodded by readers for more stories. Clearly, there was some sort of audience for what I was writing.

It was in 2016 – more than twenty years after I began researching online, and nearly forty years after my father showed me the National Union Catalog – that it occurred to me that there might be other novelists who were earlier in learning how to do historical research than I was by this point. And perhaps there were also novelists out there like the nonfiction authors I'd researched for in the 1980s and 1990s, who chose to farm out some of their research tasks.

I knew that the film industry made heavy use of historical consultants, to supplement the research done by historical scriptwriters. Curious now, I decided to see how many historical researchers worked with novelists. I figured that the number must be substantial.

To my shock, I discovered that only a handful of historical researchers specialize in working with authors, and only a small percentage of these specialize in working with novelists.

So I set up my shingle.

I recently opened my business, Historicalfic: Historical Research for Fiction Writers. I'm looking forward to being able to learn about new topics through my research for other writers. But most of all, I'm looking forward to recreating that day, long ago, when my father took me to a library and taught me a bit of what he knew. I'd like to hand on what I've learned since then to other authors, and to learn from them.

 

 

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Dusk Peterson's latest novel is Sweet Blood, from the award-winning alternate history series The Eternal Dungeon. The Eternal Dungeon has been split by a civil war, with the division clearly marked by a quarrel between two Seekers (torturers) whose faithfulness to each other has already become legendary. Into this explosive situation arrives a new Seeker, one who is determined to see that past evils do not continue in the dungeon. But can he keep control of himself when assigned a prisoner who falls in love with him?

 

"The word-building in this story is phenomenal, and the fact that it's inspired by historical events is even more exciting." —Rainbow Awards 2017 judge.

 

 

Honored in the Rainbow Awards, Dusk Peterson writes historical speculative fiction with diverse characters: historical fantasy, alternate history, and retrofuture science fiction. Friendship, romantic friendship, and romance often occur in the stories. Dusk Peterson also runs Historicalfic: Historical Research for Fiction Writers. A resident of Maryland, Mx. Peterson lives with an apprentice and several thousand books.

 

To learn more you can visit both their author website and research website and connect on Twitter (both author and research accounts), Facebook, and Goodreads.

 

 

 

Review: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

Publisher: Avon
Pub. Date: September 26th, 2006
Pages: 293

Genre: Fiction / Science Fiction / Horror

Synopsis

A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery. And two inquisitive boys standing precariously on the brink of adulthood will soon discover the secret of the satanic raree-show's smoke, mazes, and mirrors, as they learn all too well the heavy cost of wishes - and the stuff of nightmare.

 

What Did I Think About the Story?

I decided to pick up and finally read Something Wicked This Way Comes for a number of reasons, including the fact that I was feeling like reading a "scary story" when I read it last month, I vaguely remember really enjoying the movie version when I was a kid, and author Riley Sager was going to be conducting a Twitter chat around the book on October 25th (#ReadWithRiley) and I really wanted to participate. It's one of those classics that I felt bad about never reading, even more so because it sounds so deliciously scary. I'm incredibly sad to say that I didn't love it as much as I'd expected.

My biggest issue with the story was the way the author told it. The writing style is so florid and poetic that I found myself having to constantly stop reading and reread passages to make sure I fully understood what was happening to the characters. While this might be perfect and quite beautiful writing for a different sort of genre, when it comes to a story that is meant to be terrifying, being removed from the tension, panic, and horror ruins that feeling of terror for me. I want to feel scared, not be confused about whether or not I am understanding what is happening in the story and whether or not those characters are feeling scared. That terror has to be visceral, not just cerebral.

I do have to say that there were a few instances where I was able to get into the flow of the story and enjoy the quite unsettling things happening to this town and its inhabitants. There is one scene in particular, where the two boys witness a man riding backwards on the carousel and the horrible results when that carousel finally stops turning, that had my heart pumping deliciously. The scenes taking place within the house of mirrors were pretty scary as well. I just wish there were more of these sorts of scenes and less waxing descriptions.

I also enjoyed the way the story highlighted the frenetic nature of boys and their imaginations and need for adventure that seems to seep away as they age, as well as how that aging can slowly begin to pull even the closest boys apart as their interests and motivations begin to separate. I thought the story an interesting way to show the dangers of not being satisfied in whatever chapter of life you happen to be in - either wishing to be young and back in the "good ol' days" or fighting to grow up before your time - and how that dissatisfaction can leave you open to all sorts of nefarious choices.

All in all I am happy that I read Something Wicked This Way Comes for the Twitter chat as it is a classic and did have parts that I ended up enjoying. It was not, however, the quick, terrifying read I anticipated and I will admit that this left me somewhat disappointed overall. I would recommend those that are interested in the story based on the synopsis or other reviews give it a try...you might end up loving it as so many other readers have.
      

What Did I Think About the Cover?

No, just no. While I know what the carousel represents, why one of the boys is riding one of the horses off into the sky I cannot figure out. The book also has an 80s feel (not in a good way) even though this edition was printed in 2006, and it doesn't do anything to make me want to read the story. With so many sinister happenings going on within the story there are almost endless possibilities for a better cover than this.  


My Rating: 3.0/5.0

I purchased a copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes for my own library. All opinions are mine alone. For more information about the book, including other reviews and links to where you can purchase a copy, see Goodreads HERE.

 

 



Cover Crush: All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders

Hello, my name is Colleen and I am a cover slut. I know, I know....you aren't supposed to judge a book by it's cover. I just can't help myself! A beautiful cover draws my eye every single time and I can't help but pick up the book it's dressing and see if the inside seems as intriguing as the outside. Sometimes it does, and sometimes a pretty cover is just a pretty cover. Either way, I love getting an eyeful!


One of my favorite bloggers, Erin at Flashlight Commentary, created a weekly blog post called Cover Crush and she and some other blogger friends are sharing their favorite covers each Thursday. I've decided to join in this year and will link to their posts down below.


So, without further ado, my Cover Crush this week is.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, what a frenetically beautiful cover this is! There's so much chaos going on, with the birds flying around in every direction, partially covering up the wording so you almost get the feeling that they will cover everything soon. I love the way the lettering is so standard and uniform, which is such a great contrast to the wildness all around it. I also love how the center seems to glow faintly. To be honest I'm not sure what the novel is about, based on this cover, however I don't really care...I just keep staring at it!

 

The synopsis might give us more information to explain this frenzied cover....  

 

 

A novel about the end of the world--and the beginning of our future

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.

But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca of San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together--to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.

 

 

Don't forget to check out what covers my blogger buddies are drooling over this week (updated as they become available):


Magdalena at A Bookaholic Swede
Meghan at Of Quills & Vellum
Erin at Flashlight Commentary
Heather at The Maiden's Court
Stephanie at Layered Pages
Holly at 2 Kids and Tired



Created by Magdalena of A Bookaholic Swede

 

 

 

Cover Crush: The Dream Keeper's Daughter by Emily Colin

Hello, my name is Colleen and I am a cover slut. I know, I know....you aren't supposed to judge a book by it's cover. I just can't help myself! A beautiful cover draws my eye every single time and I can't help but pick up the book it's dressing and see if the inside seems as intriguing as the outside. Sometimes it does, and sometimes a pretty cover is just a pretty cover. Either way, I love getting an eyeful!


One of my favorite bloggers, Erin at Flashlight Commentary, created a weekly blog post called Cover Crush and she and some other blogger friends are sharing their favorite covers each Thursday. I've decided to join in this year and will link to their posts down below.


So, without further ado, my Cover Crush this week is.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think what first drew me to this cover was the gorgeous canopy road! I grew up in Tallahassee, FL and my hometown is full of these gorgeous roads, where the road becomes dappled with sunlight and everything seems to sparkle just so. I also love how the woman in the center is almost sepia-toned and that coloring seems to spread out from her until it hits the tree line. This makes me feel like the woman is more a memory from the past or somehow isn't really there in the same world as the trees saturated in green. It all combines into an exceptionally interesting cover.

 

 

Let's see what is really going on within these pages...

 

 

An archaeologist discovers her presumed-missing boyfriend is trapped more than a hundred years in the past—a love story that transcends time and place, from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Memory Thief.

Eight years after the unsolved disappearance of her boyfriend Max Adair, archaeologist Isabel Griffin has managed to move on and rebuild her life with her young daughter, Finn, her last tie to Max. But after a series of strange incidents, Isabel begins to wonder if Max might still be alive somewhere, trying to communicate with her. She has no idea that the where isn’t the problem—it’s the when. Max has slipped through time and place, landing on his ancestral family plantation in 1816 Barbados, on the eve of a historic slave uprising. As Isabel searches for answers, Max must figure out not only how to survive the violence to come, but how to get back to his own century, the woman he loves, and the daughter he has only ever met in his dreams.

 

 

Don't forget to check out what covers my blogger buddies are drooling over this week (updated as they become available):



Magdalena at A Bookaholic Swede
Meghan at Of Quills & Vellum
Erin at Flashlight Commentary
Heather at The Maiden's Court
Stephanie at Layered Pages
Holly at 2 Kids and Tired

 

 

Created by Magdalena of A Bookaholic Swede

 

 

Cover Crush: The History of Bees by Maja Lunde

Hello, my name is Colleen and I am a cover slut. I know, I know....you aren't supposed to judge a book by it's cover. I just can't help myself! A beautiful cover draws my eye every single time and I can't help but pick up the book it's dressing and see if the inside seems as intriguing as the outside. Sometimes it does, and sometimes a pretty cover is just a pretty cover. Either way, I love getting an eyeful!


One of my favorite bloggers, Erin at Flashlight Commentary, created a weekly blog post called Cover Crush and she and some other blogger friends are sharing their favorite covers each Thursday. I've decided to join in this year and will link to their posts down below.


So, without further ado, my Cover Crush this week is.....

 

 

 

 

Seriously, how gorgeous is this cover?! I mean, where do I start? The intricately drawn vines and leaves? The luminescent bees fluttering around? The heavy sprinkling of pollen that appears to fall over all of it? It's simply stunning! I'm not a big fan of bees, but looking at this cover I might become one!

 

 

While I think it's safe to say this book has something to do with bees, let's see what else we can look forward to discovering behind this beautiful artwork...

 

 

In the spirit of Station Eleven and Never Let Me Go, this dazzling and ambitious literary debut follows three generations of beekeepers from the past, present, and future, weaving a spellbinding story of their relationship to the bees and to their children and one another against the backdrop of an urgent, global crisis.


England, 1852. William is a biologist and seed merchant, who sets out to build a new type of beehive one that will give both him and his children honor and fame.

United States, 2007. George is a beekeeper fighting an uphill battle against modern farming, but hopes that his son can be their salvation.

China, 2098. Tao hand paints pollen onto the fruit trees now that the bees have long since disappeared. When Tao's young son is taken away by the authorities after a tragic accident, she sets out on a grueling journey to find out what happened to him.

Haunting, illuminating, and deftly written, The History of Bees joins these three very different narratives into one gripping and thought-provoking story that is just as much about the powerful bond between children and parents as it is about our very relationship to nature and humanity."

 

Don't forget to check out what covers my blogger buddies are drooling over this week (updated as they become available):


Magdalena at A Bookaholic Swede
Meghan at Of Quills & Vellum
Erin at Flashlight Commentary
Heather at The Maiden's Court
Stephanie at Layered Pages
Holly at 2 Kids and Tired




Created by Magdalena of A Bookaholic Swede

 

Spotlight on The Book of Air by Joe Treasure

Kitchen Surgery 

A group of people have gathered in Jason’s house in rural Wales, survivors of a virus that has wiped out most of the human population. Deirdre and Alesky have been out on a horse in scavenging tools and food from abandoned neighbouring farms. Meanwhile, with the help of Abigail and Maud, Jason has been searching for his five-year-old nephew Simon, who he last saw playing in the barn. 

We hear the cart on the drive. It’s moving faster than it should. We’re halfway across the yard when the horse comes round the side of the house, dragging the cart at a speed that tilts it on to its outer wheels at the turn. The geese scatter. The jackdaws flap from the stable roof, making their harsh noise. Deirdre pulls sharply on the reins and the horse rears up. 

Aleksy is slumped beside her. Deirdre’s shouting, ‘He’s hit, they shot him, he’s losing blood.’ We’re all over him, trying to help him down – Deirdre above him on the cart, Abigail lifting his legs, me pulling at him, taking the weight. And Aleksy’s thumping me, pummelling my shoulder. ‘Not me. The boy. See to the boy.’ I pull away and he stumbles to the ground, cursing in Polish. 

I get on the cart and fling the cardboard boxes aside. And there’s Simon in a foetal crouch. He rocks from side to side, humming to himself. 

‘What is it, Si? Where’d they get you?’ 

Abigail is beside me, straightening Simon’s legs, feeling for damage, touching his arms and fingers. 

I lift his hand gently from the side of his head. There’s a gash above the ear, muddied and bleeding – not a bullet wound. 

‘Is it your head, Si? Does it hurt anywhere else?’ 

He’s crammed with words that won’t come out. 

I carry him into the kitchen, following the trail of Aleksy’s blood. Aleksy is sideways on a kitchen chair, his good arm clinging to the back. Deirdre has cut the shirt sleeve from the injured arm. For a moment the wound is bright and open like a mouth, blood pulsing out of it. She’s knotted a tea towel above and winds it tight with a spoon. Abigail has pushed aside jars of jam to make space on the table for her sewing box. She pulls out pin cushions and reels of thread. She has a sheet over her shoulder. Maud comes up from the cellar with a bottle of brandy. They’ve got stuff stored away I don’t even know about. The kettle’s already rattling on the stove. 

I sit Simon on a chair and crouch to look at him. There’s no colour in his face. The external bleeding isn’t much but I’m worried about the knock to his skull. Behind him, Aleksy’s doing a lot of grunting. Maud and Abigail hold him still while Deirdre sews him up. Simon keeps twisting round to look, so I give up and turn his chair the other way. 

When I start cleaning the wound Simon says, ‘Ow’ and puts his hand up but he doesn’t take his eyes off the main attraction. ‘I said Ow.’ 

‘I heard you, but I’ve got to make sure it’s clean before I put a bandage on.’ 

Aleksy asks Deirdre if she’s done this before. 

‘With a horse, once, I did,’ she says. 

‘Well remember, please, that I am not a horse.’ 

I explode at them. ‘Christ, you two, what were you thinking, taking Simon?’ 

‘He was on the cart,’ Deirdre says. ‘He was playing in the boxes. We were a mile away before we knew.’ 

Aleksy grunts. ‘Stop talking and sew.’

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Publisher: Clink Street Publishing

Pub. Date: April 4th, 2017

Pages: 286

Genre: Science Fiction/Dystopian

Retreating from an airborne virus with a uniquely unsettling symptom, property developer Jason escapes London for his country estate, where he is forced to negotiate a new way of living with an assortment of fellow survivors. 

Far in the future, an isolated community of descendants continue to farm this same estate. Among their most treasured possessions are a few books, including a copy of Jane Eyre, from which they have constructed their hierarchies, rituals and beliefs. When 15-year-old Agnes begins to record the events of her life, she has no idea what consequences will follow. Locked away for her transgressions, she escapes to the urban ruins and a kind of freedom, but must decide where her future lies.

These two stories interweave, illuminating each other in unexpected ways and offering long vistas of loss, regeneration and wonder.

The Book of Air is a story of survival, the shaping of memory and the enduring impulse to find meaning in a turbulent world.

Buy the Book

Amazon UK

About the Author

Joe Treasure currently lives in South West London with his wife Leni Wildflower. As an English teacher in Wales, he ran an innovative drama programme, before following Leni across the pond to Los Angeles, an experience that inspired his critically acclaimed debut novel The Male Gaze (published by Picador). His second novel Besotted (also published by Picador) also met with rave reviews.

You can find out more about Joe on his website, and connect with him on Twitter.

Spotlight on The Galery Series by Aithal

Beyond the Milk Way (Book One)

Publisher: Season Ball
Pub. Date: November 25th, 2015
Pages: 362


Are we alone?


Three astronauts go to space in search of a planet that probably has water—one of the basic elements for humanity to survive. Do they find it? What else do they find? They encounter something—something strange—beyond their wildest imaginations, and their mission-to-explore becomes a mission-to-survive.

They experience something that makes them question their beliefs. All the things they had taken for granted, everything they had seen and learned, don’t seem to apply any longer.

Something happens along the way that makes them yearn to come back to Earth. After all, home is where the heart is.

This is not just another science fiction. Rather, it will make you question your own beliefs—may they be scientific, religious, political, or something else.


In the first installment of The Galaxy Series, find out about the strange world they discover.

Buy the Book

 

 

Amazon

 

 

Book Trailer

 

 

 

 

 

Return to Earth (Book Two)

 

 

Publisher: Season Ball

Pub. Date: January 20th, 2017

Pages: 172

 

 



After their shuttle met with an accident and landed on a strange planet, the three astronauts return to Earth with the help of the aliens. However, they end up returning in the wrong time—in the future.

What they experience truly shocks them. They return to a time when separation, division, and hatred, rule the day. Indeed, they return to Earth. But is it really home? What has happened to their beloved planet? And what has happened to their country, the most powerful nation on Earth? Is it still the most powerful country on Earth? Whose doing is it?

In a place where how a human sees and treats a fellow human defines his existence. In a time when survival is the most important thing, the human spirit of endurance and sharing shows how life can be when things become dire.


In this second book of The Galaxy Series, join the adventures of the three astronauts and an alien on Earth. Take an emotional rollercoaster ride as they travel through America, see what they see and ask yourself—‘is this what I want to leave for my next generation?’

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About the Author

 

 

Aithal resides in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. Find out more about Aithal's books on the Galaxy Series website, and connect on Facebook and Twitter.